The Birth of Kartharka


The game “Lair of Sword and Sorcery” grew from a few key moments from the past years.

I  had spent the last few years playing Dungeons and Dragons after a long time away from the game. 

The group was a mix of newcomers, old timers like me, and those in between.

Us old-timers thought it would be fun to play a very old adventure with the new rules, which we did for a while but it just didn't have the feel we wanted. So I dusted off the old books and ran a group of adventures using  first edition rules. Again it just didn't do it for us. So I decided I was going to make up my own rule set.

So I started, and planned out a role playing game that didn't excite me any more than the system I had abandoned.

So the problem wasn't the rules, or the pre-made worlds, or the playing group or specific adventure flavor or style I was looking for.  But what was it?
I
 thought: I’d get right down to the roots, combing through materials from the late 70’s and early 80’s looking for the thing that role playing once had for me and was now gone.
I was reading anything and everything and just couldn't find it.

And suddenly there it was on Ebay:


I saw these little guys online, and I remembered everything.

I remember the day I first got them as a kid. I took those little guys home and pulled out construction paper, tape and pens and made a massive dungeon, but not the way a gamer would now but the way an 8 year old would.

It was massive and sprawled 2 feet by 2 feet. A maze of full 3D walls , with working secret passages and traps scattered everywhere.  And roaming through it were these little demons, wizards and snake men. 5 minutes of thought towards some rules, pulled from the Fighting Fantasy game books, and I was hacking through these monsters, trying different paths and playing for hours.

All on that board.

I sort of knew what role playing games were. I had the basic Dungeons and Dragons red box set and thought it was amazing.

A lot of rules though for an 8 year old who didn’t have an older brother or cousin to follow to a game. But there were a lot of awesome pictures and tables full of weapons.

What I played by myself in those first days wasn't Dungeons and Dragons, but instead my idea of what Dungeons and Dragons was.  Based on the Dungeons and Dragons scene from E.T., the dungeons and dragons cartoon, and so many movies, like Hawk the Slayer, Conan the Barbarian, Dragonslayer, and He-man, to an eight year old all these things were from the same world and it all fit together.

I had D&D color forms and  toy figures. Whenever I saw something in the world with a dragon or a barbarian I thought it was all D&D.

It was all one glorious world where the only limit was imagination.


Well when I got those figures again on Ebay I broke out my construction paper and scissors again. I had more fun cutting and taping that thing together than I’d had in many a night of gaming in the last couple of years.  There were no rules to consider, no game balance in mind, nothing other than having fun and creating something raw from scratch. I had finally found what I was looking for and it all fell into place.

That day the game Lair of Sword & Sorcery was born.

If you want to have that feeling again too, think about picking clicking the "buy online" link and get your copy of Lair right now.
~Ripley

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